Is there a text in this hobbit? Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring

That is why I regard the role of Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the Appendices; it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its structure: which is planned to be 'hobbito-centric', that is, primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 181, Draft of a letter to Michael Straight (Jan./Feb. 1956)

The epic fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is now beginning to be accepted as canonical in the literature of the twentieth century (as signified by Harold Bloom's recent publication of a collection of Modern Critical Interpretations: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings [2000] and argued by Tom Shippey in his J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century [2000]). Those readers familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring will be most interested in how clearly and well New Zealand director Peter Jackson has adapted to film medium this important modern classic-first in a projected series of three films based on the epic trilogy, each to be released at Christmas beginning with the year 2001-and what in particular he has left out or changed (and to what purpose).

As to what has been done well, the special effects are, as one might expect in a film series of three films for which four hundred million dollars have been spent, terrific. The creepy Black Riders and their black horses with their nail-studded hooves are especially malevolent. The Elf Queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), in one significant moment, demonstrates what a Dark Queen might have looked like in what must be a photo-negative image. The scenery is exactly right, based on the illustrations of the Shire and Bag End by Tolkien, the illustrations by Alan Lee of the pastoral Rivendell, of the wonderful tall columns of Barad-- Dur, and of Orthanc and Minas Tirith; and also by John Howe. The cinematography-by Andrew Lesnie-remarkably reflects Tolkien's vision. Costuming and makeup reveal Strider as grubby from all that striding-as he should be-mithril mail (as worn by Frodo) as appropriately shining in its silver.

Unfortunately, Jackson's version of The Fellowship of the Ring is overall a flashy, hightech adventure film that rewrites Tolkien's epic narrative about Frodo the Ringbearer and the Hobbit, Dwarf, Elf, and Human representatives who accompany him on his quest to return the Ring to Mordor. Such rewriting is not wholly unexpected on the part of New Zealander horror-film-specialist Jackson, who has previously directed The Frighteners (1996), an inexplicable step backward from the fine film Heavenly Creatures (1994), made about the murder of a teenage girl's mother by a fourteen-year-old and her best friend, Juliet Hulme (later to take the name of Anne Perry, detective-story-writer). In part because of the screenwriter's necessity to focus tightly on selected, representative incidents and to omit the didactic and nondramatic-nonvisual-portions, Jackson reduces The Fellowship to an action film in which the important complex thematic meanings and characterizations are discarded or subordinated to the sentimental (Frodo's tears after Gandalf [Ian McKellen] is lost in the Mines of Moria), the frightening (Ringwraiths, Orcs, the Cave Troll, the Balrog), and the romantic (the meeting of Arwen [Liv Tyler] with Aragorn [Viggo Mortensen] to give up her immortality out of love for him). Deleted from the film are central episodes such as Tom Bombadil's rescue of the Hobbits from the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs. Although these episodes may not sound so crucial to the narrative, they (and others that precede them) constitute about seven of the twelve chapters in the first book alone (chapters 2-8, "The Shadow of the Past," "Three Is Company," "A Short Cut to Mushrooms," "A Conspiracy Unmasked," "The Old Forest," "In the House of Tom Bombadil," and "Fog on the Barrow-Downs"). Substituted in the film is the episode involving Arwen, daughter of Elrond (Hugo Weaving), as a feminized Amazon warrior and her relationship with Aragorn, for rescuer Elf-lord Glorfindel on his horse Asfaloth, in "The Flight to the Ford" (chapter 12).

Most important is the diminution of Frodo from a fifty-year-old Hobbit (his age is measured in Hobbit Years) to the boyish (even childlike) Elijah Wood in the central role as he begins the quest. Like a child greeting his father, Frodo jumps happily onto Gandalf's lap when the wizard returns to the Shire after nine years' absence, in distinct contrast to their reserved meeting in The Fellowship: "But that evening, as Sam was walking home and twilight was fading, there came the once familiar tap on the study window. Frodo welcomed his old friend with surprise and great delight. They looked hard at one another" (70; my emphasis). Throughout, the Hobbits are called-not "Halflings" as they are in Tolkien, especially by contemptuous and disrespectful Men,-but "Little Ones," a demeaning and petlike term that sums up the reductive roles they play in the film. Even if it is argued that Frodo, at thirty-three, is in fact just coming out of his "tweens" at his coming of age partya "Long Expected Party" like Bilbo's own birthday party in the text-he does not leave on the quest for some fifteen to twenty years after that party, at a "sober" age that Tolkien describes as "significant": "So it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near; fifty was a number that he felt was somehow significant (or ominous); it was at any rate at that age that adventure had suddenly befallen Bilbo" (66). Tolkien himself would have been nearing fifty in the late 1930s when he began The Lord of the Rings and was in his sixties at the time when it was published in 1953. During this period of passage, Bilbo has possessed the Ring, which apparently preserves his youth, and yet, if that is so, then why does Bilbo (Ian Holm) appear so old even at the moment he gives it up to Gandalf? Underscoring Frodo's immaturity, Wood's two major expressions (A la Ben Stiller in Zoolander) are a blank doll-like stare and a look of perplexed fright.